I was invited to give a presentation regarding how we have engaged chemists in crowdsourcng chemistry. The presentation was to the Board on Mathematical Sciences and Their Applications within the National Research Council. It was very educational for me to attend the meeting and interesting to observe so many of the common challenges.

1. Engaging Participation from the
Chemistry Community
Antony Williams
February 18th 2013

2. Crowdsourcing Chemistry
 How have I personally “crowdsourced chemistry”
 What have we done to enable the crowd to
participate?
 What is the Royal Society of Chemistry doing to
facilitate crowdsourcing?
 What are the benefits of encouraging involvement?
 And how big is the crowd???
 What are our intentions moving forward?
 Lessons from our experiences and experiments

3. Personal Contributions

4. Wikipedia

5. Does one stereocenter matter?
 Thalidomide

6. Validating Public Datasets

7. Challenging the Status Quo

8. With Great Fanfare…

9. NPC Browser http://tripod.nih.gov/npc/

11. NPC Browser http://tripod.nih.gov/npc/

12. What is the Structure of Vitamin K1?

13. Wolfram Alpha

14. DailyMed

16. The World of Online Chemistry
 Safety data
 Toxicity data
 Blogs and Wikis
 Property databases
 Experimental results
 Scientific publications
 Compound aggregators
 Open Notebook Science
 Metabolic pathway databases
 Encyclopedic articles (Wikipedia)

17. Public Domain Databases
 Our databases are a mess…
 Non-curated databases are proliferating errors
 We source and deposit data between databases
 Original sources of errors hard to determine
 Curation is time-consuming and challenging

18. What you might not know about
Chemistry Databases on the Internet
 Data-sharing between the databases is cyclic –
proliferating errors – “Linked Data”

19. Stop Whining – Fix it

20. Enable the crowd to participate….

21. We Want to Answer Questions
 Questions a chemist might ask…
 What is the melting point of n-heptanol?
 What is the chemical structure of Xanax?
 Chemically, what is phenolphthalein?
 What are the stereocenters of cholesterol?
 Where can I find publications about xylene?
 What are the different trade names for Ketoconazole?
 What is the NMR spectrum of Aspirin?
 What are the safety handling issues for Thymol Blue?

22. Available Information…
 Linked to vendors, safety data, toxicity, metabolism

23. Available Information….

24. Crowdsourced “Annotations”
 Users can add
 Descriptions/Syntheses/Commentaries
 Links to PubMed articles
 Links to articles via DOIs
 Add spectral data
 Add Crystallographic Information Files
 Add photos
 Add MP3 files
 Add Videos

26. Crowdsourced Curation
 Crowdsourced curation: identify/tag errors, edit
names, synonyms, identify records to deprecate

27. Search “Vitamin H”

28. “Curate” Identifiers

29. “Curate” Identifiers

30. Why are Dictionaries important?

31. The Final Search Strategy

32. Originally 15 compounds “called” Yohimbine
54 Skeletons for Yohimbine

33. Community Contribution to ChemSpider

34. www.SpectralGame.com
http://www.jcheminf.com/content/1/1/9

35. Curation through “gaming”

36. Data Curation

37. True Curation of Data

38. Mobilizing the Community

39. ChemSpider SyntheticPages

40. ChemSpider SyntheticPages

41. Submission Process
 Crowdsourced expansion?
 A few regular dedicated authors only
 Online peer review and feedback small but useful

42. Crowdsourcing – does it work?
 ~200 people EVER have deposited or curated data
 ChemSpider SyntheticPages small group of authors
 Database hosts make the largest contributions
 ChemSpider staff tend to do the most curation

43. Contributions

44. Curations
 2009 – 8255 curations by 43 people
 2010 – 10014 curations by 66 people
 2011 – 16025 curations by 116 people
 “Crowdsourcing” – the crowd is small!

45. www.SciMobileApps.com
 8 contributors only…in 7 months

46. www.SciDBs.com
 7 contributors only…in 6 months

47. www.ScientistsDB.com
 38 contributors …in 6 weeks

48. How will it improve?
Participation
and
contribution

49. What encourages participation?
 “Interested” parties contribute
 Marketing and self-promotion are primary reasons
for participation
 There are very few “selfless” participants
 Relationships garner contributions…

50. The Measure of a Scientist?
 How do “we” measure a scientist?
 The funding bodies, department heads etc. use
 Publication profile
 Impact factors
 An index – h, m, g, i10, c, s …
 Grants brought in

51. Scientists Profiles

52. The Measure of a Scientist?
 How do “we” measure a scientist?
 The funding bodies, department heads etc. use
 Publication profile
 Impact factors
 An index – h, m, g, i10, c, s …
 Grants brought in
 Scientists are notable in MANY different ways
 Technology can help measure different types of
“impact”

53. The Alt-Metrics Manifesto
 http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/

54. ImpactStory

55. ImpactStory

56. PlumAnalytics

57. Rewards and Recognition

58. Wikipedia Badges and Barnstars
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:BADGE

59. ChemSpider SyntheticPages Awards

60. Lessons
 The “crowd” of contributing participants is likely
quite small – there are selfless participants and
others who might want recognition
 How will you recognize participation – what are
the rewards and recognition??? “Altmetrics” is
likely a valuable path moving forward
 Gaming is an opportunity for participation
 Educators are encouraging participation – look to
the success of Wikipedia

61. Thank you
Email: williamsa@rsc.org
Twitter: ChemConnector
Personal Blog: www.chemconnector.com
SLIDES: www.slideshare.net/AntonyWilliams